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Wednesday, 20 April 2011

YetMoreGiantWordFormations

A Finnish colleague of mine went on an English copywriting course in London a couple of weeks ago. Upon her return, she told me that she had been advised that to write good business English copy for an international audience, sentences should not contain words of over 3 syllables.

The thought immediately sprung to my mind that this would be impossible in her native language!

Yes folks, it's time for me to have another dig at the ridiculous length of Finnish words...

But actually, it doesn't stop there. Oh no, because Finns have a whole raft of things they can add at the end of words to make their words longer still.

There is the suffix “-ko”, which turns a sentence into a question. There are suffixes to indicate possession (“-ni” = my, “-si” = your, “-nsa” = his/her/their, etc.). The suffix “-kin” means “also” or “as well”, while “-kaan” means “not either” or “neither”. If you put “-ton” at the end of a word, it means there isn't any of that word, the equivalent of the “-less” ending in English. The ending “-ja” often denotes a person who does something, e.g. opettaa (“to teach”) leads to opettaja (“teacher”). The ending “-la” can be used a place, so “ravintola” (restaurant) is a place of nourishment (“ravinto”). The suffix “-lainen” describes someone from a place, e.g. “englantilainen” is an Englishman or Englishwoman...

And the list goes on... and on... and on...

So put all that together, and you have bizarre words like:

luotaanpäästämättömydestäänsäkään

a somewhat theoretical word, which means roughly “despite even of his/her tendency of not letting go﻿”, which I have seen explained as follows:

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About Me

I am not Finnish (I am Franco-English). I don't speak much Finnish (though I do speak several other languages). I don't even live in Finland and I never have (I currently reside in the UK). But I have been given an honoury Finnish name (Olli Miekka) by some Finns I know, so surely that qualifies me to comment on all things Fininish.